Just a quick question, is there anyway to get the best of SOHO with Standard? haha

I installed SOHO last night, and it was way too slow on my laptop. KDE4 is just too cumbersome a beast for my old laptop. However, Standard runs great (I tried it when it first was released), but LILO doesn't seem to want to install very easily... :/

So, anyway, what's a good solution to stick with the GRUB of SOHO, XFCE of Standard, and the best of programs from both? Should I install SOHO again, remove KDE and add XFCE? Is there a way to install SOHO without KDE? I was under the impression that SOHO relies on KDE.

I agree that you may be happy with VL 7 Standard. True, it's an alpha with beta 1 soon to appear, but it has been quite stable for me through several alphas. I feel like I could use it as my main distro right now and it will only get better. (In fact, I've been using VL7 as my main OS for some time now, since an early alpha.) It uses XFce 4.8 as a desktop environment and is really a lovely thing.

You can't remove KDE from SOHO 6 because it would break too much. However, you can add XFce from the repos and never start KDE and thus all the heavy KDE stuff will not be lurking in the background. I did just that through a few release candidates. If you buy SOHO Deluxe, XFce is an option at installation time. It's not *instead of* KDE, but if you select to install XFce, you don't need to ever start KDE. I have a SOHO Deluxe partition on an old 1.3 GHz Celeron with a gig of RAM and I never use KDE, always XFce. It works very well indeed.

Once you got SOHO installed along with XFce, you could remove *parts* of KDE but not the underlying libraries.--GrannyGeek

Since this is an alpha, you'll probably be installing new versions until Final comes out. If you have room on your hard drive, leave room for another partition for when the next release comes out. Then keep them both. I always do that and it makes it much quicker to install and configure the new release. I copy lots of stuff from ~/home on the old release and if I have libraries I need for some third-party program on the old release, I just copy them to the new one. My "big" data (photos and videos) is on a FAT32 partition shared with Windows, so it's no problem. I just mount that partition in my new VL installation.

It's also a good safety net just in case the new version and your computer don't get along. It happens sometimes. You can just continue to use your previous installation and not skip a beat.

Your feedback on the alpha is VERY important. The more people who test, the better the chances of finding and fixing bugs.

I can't speak for uels, but we're doing fine. We have about two feet of snow on the ground, but that's true nearly every winter. We didn't get big dumps of snow during the coastal storms because we're too far north and west, but we did get about 14 inches yesterday. GrampaGeek is having ambulatory surgery for carpal tunnel in six weeks. That's a long time to put up with the pain, but his nighttime brace is helping some.--GrannyGeek

I installed alpha with no problem. And I'll be sure to update with feedback as I encounter bugs. Speaking of that, is there a repo yet for 7 where everyone is dumping what they've built because I didn't seem to see any of what I would have figured would be "common software" in the repos it came initially equipped with.

Glad to hear y'all didn't get hit too hard by all this weather. To me it was nothing, I used to winter in far worse, but El Paso has basically shut down for a week now. I hope to get back to classes Monday because this loss of time is killing me! I wish GrandpaGeek nothing but the best, with a pain-free as possible next few weeks and VERY speedy recovery!

The only repo for VL7 is /testing, which should already be enabled in VL7's Gslapt. Many packages have to be rebuilt for 7 and we still haven't had the first public beta, so there is a lot of work still to be done.

GrampaGeek and I thank you for your good wishes. We got another 8 inches of snow yesterday--the heavy wet stuff. We also had "thundersnow," which we've had before, and weren't as stunned as the New Yorkers interviewed in TV when they had thundersnow. We're used to lots of snow, and the best thing is that being retired, we don't have to drive in it and can just wait for the roads to be cleared.